Mr. President, Your Wall Will Not Work
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, a wall is not remotely capable of dealing with the magnitude of our continental challenge to civil order. The forces of commerce, greed, addiction, and lawless cartels and gangs are too insidious. They will surmount any wall. They already have.
The President's demand for $5 billion for a wall, whether concrete or steel, simply won't work. Why? Because most illegal narcotics are already shipped here hidden in cross-border commercial cargoes fueled by the flawed and underfunded NAFTA and CAFTA continental trade deals. Millions of trucks, autos, ships, railcars, and planes carry massive and increasing shipments of cargo traversing over our borders as continental trade increases exponentially.
Recall that NAFTA and CAFTA sucked out millions of living-wage jobs from our country, depositing them in Mexico and Central America to exploit penny-wage labor south of our border. Finished goods were then U-turned back north.
NAFTA and CAFTA negotiators promised higher wages for all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even laborers south of our border earn less now than before NAFTA passed. There is more poverty here and there as the transnationals shipped our jobs out to earn higher profits by gutting our workforce and while exploiting workers in Mexico and Central America. On both sides of the border, workers lose and investors win.
This is a map of the Laredo checkpoint. There are 16 lanes of traffic just at that one point on our border. The problem is the drugs are often hidden in those commercial cargoes. We need more agents to check cargo, but we also need technology to find the hidden narcotics that are there.
In addition to that, we see China shipping fentanyl and carfentanil into our country, including through the U.S. mails. We have no scientific way of detecting those killer drugs.
So, if you really want to look at solving the problem, it is important for the President to know that legal ports of entry are the primary route through which illicit drugs arrive here in our country. There are 48 such crossing points, plus 330 points of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, the most frequently crossed border in the world. Approximately 350 million documented crossings occur there annually.
We need to regularize that entry into the United States. We need more manpower and technology. There is no way we can solve this problem with a wall.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source